The Nugget

Lotto, Wookie and Sue are three road workers based in Mudgee, N.S.W. At weekends they abandon their wives to go prospecting for gold and one day they discover the biggest nugget in the world - the problem is, how do they turn it into cash, and who really owns it?. The Nugget is a small-scale comedy which has some delightful sequences, the best of which comes near the beginning, when Lotto, played by Eric Bana, loses his winning scratch lotto ticket down a drain in the middle of town and the lads dig up the entire street trying to find it. Nothing else quite matches that inventive kick-off, and scenes in which the friends and their wives fall out over their treasure, or those in which they fall foul of the local scrap-merchant and the town pimp, aren`t always quite as hilarious as they should be. Writer/director, Bill Bennett is wonderful with drama, Kiss Or Kill and Backlash are superb films, and In A Savage Land was underrated; but maybe comedy isn`t his forte. Bana, Stephen Curry and Dave O`Neill are terrific in the leading roles - Bana, especially, shows great versatility. But I was less persuaded by the presence of Max Cullen who plays a silly old coot who observes the action from afar and who proves a rather irritating narrator.